About Us

YouthWorks provides Christ-centered mission trips for more than 20,000 teenagers and adult leaders in over 60 communities across the U.S. and beyond. We believe that these kinds of mission trip experiences positively impact the communities we partner with, the teenagers who are stretched and challenged through a week of service, and the adult leaders who build mission trips into the ongoing discipleship of their teenagers. Our staff has been creating mission trip experiences for teenagers and adult leaders for more than 20 years, and in that time, the Holy Spirit has led us to be about these things:

JESUS

Everything we do points to Jesus.

We create mission trip experiences because we want to point all sorts of people to Jesus. We seek to restore relationships, love others, and serve communities because Jesus set that example for us. Everything we do comes out of our desire to follow the greatest commandment that Jesus gave us—to love God and love others. When we get this right, we help people experience unconditional love and care for one another through the lens of Jesus Christ.

TEENAGERS

We want teenagers to understand who God is, how God sees them, and how God may use them to impact our world.

We love teenagers, and we know mission trip experiences can be a powerful discipleship tool for your youth ministry. We believe that God is at work in the life of each teenager, even in ways that we can’t see, and our responsibility is to help create an environment where the Holy Spirit can continue this work. That’s why we welcome you to bring every teenager who is willing to join us for a mission trip. When you do, we’ll equip you with what you need to support what God is doing in their lives.

CHURCHES AND YOUTH LEADERS

We want church and youth leaders to be free to focus on building relationships.

We count it a privilege to support the work of the Christian Church, and we recognize that we are not a church. We can’t do the crucial year-round relational work that church leaders do every day, but we have committed ourselves to providing the kind of mission trip experience that best supports the year-round discipleship ministries of our partner churches. That’s why when you come on a YouthWorks trip, we buy food, find housing, plan programming, set up service sites, create countless resources, and do much more—so adult leaders can focus on relationships.

MULTI-DENOMINATIONAL

We seek to serve every part of the body of Christ.

With Jesus at our center, we believe in supporting all the ways that God is at work in every part of the body of Christ, which includes a broad spectrum of Christian denominations. Because of this, YouthWorks intentionally operates as a multi-denominational organization, and we invite people from every Christian tradition to join us for a mission trip experience.

We want to emphasize that as you interact with our community partners and church partners, you may be exposed to Christian practices as well as theological, doctrinal, and spiritual beliefs that could be very different than your own. We believe these encounters can be turned into teachable moments for your group, and we provide Church Group Time at the end of each day so that you can intentionally help your group process all they’ve seen, heard, and experienced. This is an incredible time for meaningful conversations with your teenagers about their own beliefs and convictions. We believe these interactions are vital steps in the faith-formation of teens.

COMMUNITIES

We approach communities with humility and a willingness to partner in the work God is already doing.

Our commitment to a community always begins with humility. We desire to walk side-by-side with our friends in service, helping support the work God is already doing through them. Our staff, church partners, and teenagers have a lot to learn from our community partners, so we provide opportunities for them to share their history and God-moments with every group who serves on a YouthWorks mission trip. Their stories help teenagers see how God is moving in each of the communities we serve, and it creates an incredible opportunity for church and youth leaders to begin conversations with their teenagers about the love and work of God.

SUMMER STAFF

We invest in the next generation of ministry leaders.

We spend significant significant resources finding, hiring, and training the next generation of ministry leaders as the summer staff for our mission sites. In their time on staff with us, we guide them through the incredible responsibility of caring for our community partners, supporting our church leaders, and being strong role models for every teenager who comes on a YouthWorks mission trip. We invest so much in this young generation because we want to join in the work God is doing to shape them into ministry leaders and heroes of the Christian faith.